Bruno Beger
| Bruno Beger | |
|---|---|
Beger conducting anthropometric studies in Sikkim
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| Born |
April 27, 1911 Frankfurt am Main, German Empire |
| Died | October 12, 2009 (aged 98) Königstein im Taunus, Germany |
| Nationality | German |
| Alma mater | University of Jena |
| Occupation | Anthropologist |
| Known for | 1938–1939 German expedition to Tibet |
Bruno Beger (27 April 1911 – 12 October 2009) was a German racial anthropologist who worked for the Ahnenerbe. In that role he participated in Ernst Schäfer's 1938 journey to Tibet, helped the Race and Settlement Office or SS-Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt of the SS identify Jews, and later helped select human subjects to be killed to create an anatomical study collection of Jewish skeletons.
Beger was born in 1911 to an old Heidelberg family that soon after came upon hard times when Beger's father was killed in World War I, but a family friend paid for him to attend the University of Jena where he was first exposed to Hans F. K. Günther during a lecture, a man who would encourage him through his early academic career in anthropology and ethnology.
In 1934, Beger began working a part-time job in the Race and Settlement Office of the SS where he eventually became a section head. Beger was asked to be part of an expedition to Hawaii, but while this was awaiting final approval, he was invited on a trip to Tibet led by Ernst Schäfer which he accepted instead.
In a proposal he wrote to Schäfer, Beger stated his contribution to the expedition would be "to study the current racial-anthropological situation through measurements, trait research, photography and moulds... and to collect material about the proportion, origins, significance and development of the Nordic race in this region."
All through the expedition, Beger kept a travel diary which was published in book form 60 years later, Mit der deutschen Tibetexpedition Ernst Schäfer 1938/39 nach Lhasa (Wiesbaden, 1998). Only 50 copies of it exist.
Beger worked together with August Hirt at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg. His assignment, which he carried out, was to provide the Nazi physician with detainees of diverse ethnic types from various concentration camps in order to serve Hirt's lethal racial experiments. The work involved selecting over 100 individuals from Auschwitz to be murdered for their skeletons. They were mainly Jews, and the crime was exposed during the Nuremberg trials in 1946. The victims were sent to Natzweiler concentration camp for gassing by Joseph Kramer. Their corpses were then sent to Hirt in Strasburg. In these endeavours he was assisted by doctors Hans Endres, Hans Fleischhacker, Heinrich Rübel and Rudolf Trojan.
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